In Spoons, In Knives for The Silver Road

The Silver Road is our experimental, minimalist storytelling game. We’re delighted with the response to this book, and we have a slate of settings to share with you.

The first two releases are: In Knives, In Spoons – a 1930s heavy industrial setting inspired by the likes of Peaky Blinders, and Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland – a surreal and psychedelic take on a lost ice age land and the people who live there.

In Spoons, In Knives

The foundries never stop pounding out knives to send all around the world. The finest tables are dressed with shining silverware from the dirtiest town on god’s good earth. The shipyards grow great hulks from iron skeletons like whales rotting backwards in an endless cacophony of rivets.

Great burning spark-breathed canyons of fire drawing our wire for the colonies and steel plates for the ships and needles for record players. Day after day spent in pouring and brazing and casting and smelting.

But at night the streets are alive with jazz music and young people fighting and dancing. Knives and heels flick in the moonlight. Lipstick and blood.

There are paydays and so there are bookies. There is duty owing on whisky and tobacco and cocaine and so there is smuggling. Betting on horses and dogs and cocks. Betting on which cockroach will climb the wall and which young man can batter the other the hardest.

The steam hammers and greed and lust and rage go round and round up and down without end.

In Spoons, In Knives takes us to an imagined 1930s, and the heart of Britain’s industrial centres – be they Birmingham, Sheffield, or Glasgow.

The Silver Road creates settings and stories through play, and everyone around the table has the power to shape the reality within the story. And so setting sourcebooks like In Spoons, In Knives present a grab bag of useful and inspiring setting “stuff”. We’ve organised these entries into groups of 6, so that any section can be used with dice rolls to randomly add detail and flavour to your story.

You’ll find ideas for characters, stories, details from within the turbulent world of 1930s industrial Britain. Will you play as a group of musicians, poets, orphans, foundry workers, nurses or a mix of unexpected companions thrown together by circumstance?

In Spoons, In Knives also contains an optional new “rule” (“rule” is a strange word for such a minimal game – “suggested procedure?”) for foreshadowing the next scene with the results of your dice rolls in the current scene. This allows the GM to do even less work during the game, and shares the organisational creative burden even wider.

This being a release for The Silver Road, this isn’t a dry history source book. All our Silver Road settings contain an element of surrealism, led by the curious artwork which we make with the Midjourney AI. Expect a feast of weird and wonderful imagery – the book will be the same 21cm square format as The Silver Road, and they will sit together beautifully on your shelf.